1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of computers, and in particular to webpages that are accessible to computers via a network such as the World Wide Web. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for scanning a hard copy of a document and creating a webpage that has active windows that are defined by the physical appearance of images on the hard copy of the document.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the 1960s, a network was created of academic and military computers that were linked together by packet switching. This network was called the ARPANET, and was the precursor to today's Internet, which connects multi-millions of computers worldwide.
In the early 1990s, a system known as the World Wide Web (WWW) was implemented to afford an efficient system for communicating specially formatted documents over the Internet. The WWW system includes special Internet servers that support documents that are specially formatted in a markup language called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Documents created using HTML, and identified by a global address on the WWW known as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), are known as webpages. HTML supports links to other webpages, as well as access to graphics, audio, and video files.
Webpages provide information about products, companies, schools, hobbies, politics, and any other topic of interest to the developer of the webpage. Similarly, webpages are essential in the field of electronic-commerce (e-commerce), in which products can be offered to and/or ordered from any person or computer that has access to a particular webpage.
Webpages, and particularly webpages developed by an enterprise such as a company, school, government agency, etc., are rarely static for long period of time. That is, webpages which populate an enterprise's website (located at a main URL on the WWW) are often updated, added, removed and otherwise modified. Creating such webpages normally requires the talent of one skilled in the field of computer programming, and particularly with HTML programming.
In an effort to make the creation of webpages easier, several procedures have been developed to scan data from a hard copy, and then using the scanned data to populate a webpage. An example of such a procedure is described in U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. US 2002/0124025 A1, filed Sep. 5, 2002 by Janakiraman et al., which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
However, such scanning techniques typically simply export scanned text data (using an Optical Character Recognition—OCR—scanning program) into an HTML document. It would be beneficial and useful for information in the scanned text data to be used to create functionality in the webpage, by automatically creating active windows, input boxes, link buttons, etc.